This blog won't reduce scoptophilia to its moral majority definition of "watching others engaging in sexual activity" neither to its Freudian definition of "someone taking pleasure in submitting others to the control of his/her look", but will use it in its Greek acception: "the love of looking". Moralists and Psychoanalysts keep away.

June 22, 2014

Among the thousands of people sacrifying to self-portraits, I sometimes, but rarely find something targeting my own obsessions and providing a strong visual equivalent to them. It is the case of Sookie Sirene, a photographer living in Oslo and using her own body and face as the subject of her work (at least for what I found about her, which is not much). It is a scenography of the most important human inner torments (anguish, fear, despair, self-destruction, seduction, sadness, boredom, pleasure) and once again, a woman did it, men being apparently not able to explore and use the deepest of their soul with the crudity and the lucidity of their female counterparts. Or maybe they (we) do not have this richness and strength in them (us). A historical heritage of centuries of male domination being now a terrible weakness in art. Sookie Sirene leaves a longing trace in our brain and finally, a sensation of a close intimity with her, these images destroying the usual distance photography puts between the viewed and the viewer. No site for this artist, her site here and her facebook page here.

June 14, 2014

Strange I never posted anything from this great and famous japanese photographer before. Not that I share his obsessions for women in gynecologist postures or bonded or humiliated, but because it is one of the most influential image creator in the domain of body, only female it is to note. Based on a fascination for sex and death (Antoine d'Agata is one of his spiritual son in a way), I often see in his work a way to abolish the barrier between a picture designed to be seen as an esthetic work or as a support for sexual excitation. In another words, between art and porno. But since he was one of the pioneer, he deserves to be known and cited. Here I selected some images without bondage and in which I find a kind of visual poetry when in many (he is very prolific) there is much less. Born in 1940, he's a veteran now but his pictures look as fresh and juvenile as ever. You can have a glimpse on his work here.